Collaboration on Shale Gas Development A Step Toward Pragmatism

Last month an 11-member collaborative – two foundations, five state and national environmental organizations, four energy companies — announced they had formed the Center for Sustainable Shale Development. The mission: to develop and implement drilling and production standards for shale gas that are environmentally safe and can be certified by an independent third party.

In essence, the new Pittsburgh-based center is seeking to do for the unconventional fuels sector what the U.S. Green Building Council did to significantly improve design, land use practices, and energy and water efficiency when it established the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards for building construction. LEED standards changed how commercial buildings are designed and constructed. They did so by establishing a market for innovation that is encouraged, expanded, and even enforced not by regulation but by buyers.

It’s too early to know whether the collaborative — which includes Shell and Chevron, the Environmental Defense Fund and Penn Future — will produce meaningful advances in production practices. But there’s no question, at least in my mind, that the center’s formation is a significant step toward much-needed political and social pragmatism in developing the nation’s ample shale energy reserves.

The combination of directional drilling and high-pressure fracturing of deep shale formations is yielding a motherlode of energy in the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain West, Texas, and the Mid-Atlantic region. It’s produced significant job gains and helped form a new foundation for the nation’s economic recovery. The Ohio River Valley, an economic basket case for nearly two generations, is reviving.

Shale development also is producing environmental benefits, not the least of which is reducing water use in the utility sector, helping to cut carbon emissions in the U.S., and reducing coal production and use in the coal-fired electrical power industry, which is shrinking.

All of these benefits, and others — improving energy security, reducing reliance on oil imports are two — should generate a national sigh of relief, even applause. I call it a reprieve. And a reckoning.

Why? Because the actual risks of shale development are significant and demand oversight. They include excessive water consumption and proven contamination, high methane emissions, rig and transport vehicle accidents and deaths, land use disfigurement, earthquakes from wastewater disposal, erosion from drilling sites, noise and commotion in communities, pipeline leaks, and explosions. Any and all of these, plus a pit full of unproven potential risks, have unnerved citizens and prompted opposition campaigns in regions as different as Wyoming and Pennsylvania. In Michigan a petition is circulating to enact a ban of fracking, the high-pressure process that cracks rock and releases the hydrocarbons.

Such opposition could grow powerful enough to seriously block the path to a cleaner source of fuel, just as civic unrest has impeded development of power projects fueled by biomass, wind, and solar across the country. We’ve certainly seen how public opinion, driven by concern about safety, can change the vector of development, sometimes to the detriment of environmental security.

To wit:

In the bright light of historical perspective, and in the era of climate change, it’s not terribly difficult to make the case that the U.S. erred in essentially closing down the development of nuclear technology to power the electrical sector. The accident at Three Mile Island in March 1979 (I was a cub reporter at a daily in Wilkes-Barre, PA and covered the story) was powerful evidence of the catastrophic risks of nuclear energy. Disposal of radioactive wastes is a big technical and political impediment. Nuclear plants also are more expensive to build than fossil fuel generators. But nuclear plants produce no sulfur, nitrogen, or toxic air emissions, and no emissions that contribute to climate change. In taking regulatory action that essentially limited nuclear energy to fueling 20 percent of the nation’s electricity, the U.S. encouraged the development of new coal-fired power plants and the continued operation of old ones. Until very recently over half of the country’s electricity came from coal-fired plants that require more water and produce more climate-changing emissions than any other industrial sector. Nuclear power today looks like a more reasonable option than it once did, though that does not appear to be a mainstream view.

We’ve also seen how pragmatism can outlast civic emotion to encourage reasoned adjustments in policy and regulation that improve safety and enable development to proceed.

In the early 1980s the nation developed toxic waste cleanup laws and new chemical waste disposal practices in response to the 1970s discovery of buried wastes at Love Canal, NY, and at thousands of other sites. The federal Superfund Law led to the cleanup of countless old chemical dumps in rural and urban America. But the law required sites to be cleaned to near pristine levels, regardless of what the future use would be. Costs of cleanups soared, in many cases to more than $10 million an acre in rural areas, and more than $20 million an acre in cities.

To make a long and involved story short, one of the unintended consequences of toxic cleanup statutes was that sales and development of old industrial sites in cities essentially stopped. Cities couldn’t attract developers to build on land close to their downtowns. The problem was solved by amending the federal and state statutes to consider the future use of contaminated sites, developing a better scientific understanding of the real health risks from exposure to traces of the contaminants, and cleaning up to new standards that left a bit more chemicals in place but still ensured safety. The result dramatically lowered costs, and with the development of state “brownfield” cleanup funds, enabled cities to attract buyers of old industrial sites. The pragmatic change in toxic cleanup laws, which lowered costs without diminishing public safety, is one of the most important factors behind the economic renaissance that’s unfolded over the last generation in America’s big cities.

Now comes the big confrontation over shale gas and shale oil development and the risks of hydraulic fracturing. The Center for Sustainable Shale Development is a clear example of how major institutions — energy, environmental, philanthropic — are trying to develop a pragmatic path that acknowledges the proven economic and environmental benefits, and seeks to minimize or eliminate the actual risks.

Keith Schneider, a journalist and producer, is senior editor of Circle of Blue and a contributor to the New York Times, Yale e360, and other news desks. He reports on energy, water, climate, and agriculture from the United States and around the world, and writes the ModeShift blog -- http://modeshift.org/. In 2012 his work on the global Choke Point project attracted the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, which honored Circle of Blue with the $100,000 Rockefeller Centennial Innovation Award.

You quite correctly note that “the U.S. erred in essentially closing down the development of nuclear technology to power the electrical sector”. But the reasoning you provide is faulty:

The accident at Three Mile Island in March 1979…was powerful evidence of the catastrophic risks of nuclear energy.

TMI has been presented as a catastrophe for 33 years, when it was nothing of the sort. It was a safety triumph – a demonstration that complete destruction of a nuclear core can be contained with only a minute (and harmless) loss of radiation to the environment.

Disposal of radioactive wastes is a big technical and political impediment.

Safe disposal of radioactive waste is a mature technology, although one would never know it by any measure of public consensus. It’s a political impediment as the result of poorly-informed and sensationalistic reporting.

Protecting groundwater only addresses the impact of fossil fuels that occurs beneath our feet. Because verifiable carbon capture will be impossible, the atmospheric CO2 fossils create is, long-term, an environmental deal-breaker. Though the title of the group itself – “Center for Sustainable Shale Gas Development” – is an oxymoron, its token existence is proof that opposition is already powerful enough to seriously block the path of further development, and is encouraging. It has already stiffened the resolve of established environmental groups like the Sierra Club.

I suppose if the organization was anything more than a palliative public relations gesture they’d include a climatologist among their membership, although as the Debbie Downer of any group discussion, it would be an unenviable position.

I read a study somewhere which said around 20 people are killed by puppies per year in the USA, most of which are young children or babies. If that is the case there must be many many more who are mauled or attacked but don’t die from the attacks.

Perhaps we should ban puppies* seeing as they are at least two orders of magnitude more dangerous than nukes, they also produce those evil carbon dioxide molecules and require subsidies to keep them running…..

*Or at least tax them more or add regulation to make them uncompetitive

The answer to expansion of nuclear for more electricity generation is not reducing waste management, environmental protection and toxicological controls – its bringing on board brighter practitioners who can manage the entire life-cycle: mining of fuel stock, processing, generation, O&M, management of waste (both low and high levels) and facility abandonment. A serious impediment to public acceptance of nuclear power is the quality of engineering. Or more specifically, quality of nuclear engineers. This comment and assoicated replys are infantile. If this commentor is an engineer he is an embarrassment to all engineers. The author of the post is simply a tool – looking to tap into the pragmatist market like so many underemployed journalists – so I’ll give him a pass. If the practice of nuclear engineering only covers the power generation portion of the entire energy cycle, there needs to be some serious reflection on its procedures.

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BobMeinetz

April 8, 2013 02:34

IK, by your data the U.S. nuclear industry would need to provide 19 more deaths in 2013 to catch up with puppies. Here’s the one tragic death I know of, maybe you know of others:

Puppies are cute and full of energy, but they likely fall far short of the 821 billion kWh generated every year by nuclear plants, which are undoubtedly helping to power the computer on which you’re typing.

Those carbon dioxide molecules, en masse, do create some evil problems which dwarf those resulting from nuclear accidents (and even puppies).

So if EDF and others want to broker environmental protection and if necessary cleanup, does that mean those impacted can sue them when it becomes blatantly obvious that there is impact? Since EDF is a non-profit, do they and its major donors have indemnity from environmental liability? What good is an NGO acting as arbiter between industrial operations and public health? It seems to me they could wiggle out of problem that may occur and put the onus on federal and state environmental agencies. Who are way underfunded and sitting slightly outside the loop on this matter.

As screwy as CERCLA was and to some extent is, the major cost was not remedial action, but costs associated with legal, planning and development of an action. So instead of completely pushing lawyers out of the process, site cleanup became less expensive via different remedial action objectives, i.e. less stringent standards based on Risk Based Corrective Action (RBCA) policy. Hurting the lawyers a little bit was indemnity clauses of the Brownfields Act of 2002 (or 03).

A major problem with Superfund is that it really is not being funded as originally intended. Chemical and fuels producers haven’t paid into the fund since 1995. The trust for cleanup has been $0.00 since 2003. From the Tax Policy Center:

“The Superfund program has in past received funding from two sources: general funds from the Treasury and balances in the Superfund trust fund. In earlier years, revenues for the trust fund came from three dedicated excise taxes and an environmental corporate income tax. Those taxes expired in December 1995, however, and the amount of unobligated money in the fund gradually declined to zero by the end of fiscal year 2003. The Superfund trust fund has been funded almost entirely through general revenues ever since.”

By the way, the amount of money pooled by NGOs to pay environmental pragmatists, like the author of this post and EDF and flat out anti-environmental groups like Heartland could cleanup a whole lot of sites.

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